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Organizations invest significant time and resources in attracting, hiring, and retaining top talent to enable business strategy execution. But two things can quietly work against that investment: 1) the sheer volume of change moving through the organization, which outstrips employees’ capacity, and 2) additional work added throughout the year without considering capacity to deliver on it. Last year I shared my one-pager to help leaders better understand the full scope of changes happening simultaneously in their organizations, and more recently, my mid-year one-pager to address goal creep, where new goals get added without deciding what makes room for them. Both are meant to help leaders manage workforce capacity more deliberately. A new McKinsey article picks up where both leave off, treating cognitive capacity, the mental bandwidth people need for deep thinking and learning, as an organizational resource to manage strategically. Drawing on nine sources of research from publications such as Organization Science and Journal of Management Studies, the authors outline three practices for safeguarding cognitive capacity, including agreeing on what work stops before something new starts, a practice also shared in my mid-year one-pager. This article is an example of how HR practitioners can use scientific research to inform and strengthen their own recommendations.
